G2One, Inc., the Groovy & Grails professional services company, and the Groovy development team are proud to announce the release of Groovy 1.5.

Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM that integrates seamlessly with the Java platform. It offers a Java-like syntax, with language features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or Ruby, and lets your reuse all your Java libraries and protect the investment you made in Java skills, tools or application servers. Groovy can be used for various purposes, from adhoc shell scripting leveraging Java APIs, to full-blown web applications built on Spring and Hibernate through the Grails web framework. It can also be integrated very easily in your applications to externalize business logic, create Domain-Specific Languages, or to provide templating, XML parsing capabilities, and much more.

This major release integrates features offered by Java 5: annotations, generics, static imports and enums, making Groovy the sole alternative dynamic language for the JVM that lets you leverage frameworks that use annotations like Spring's @Transactional or JBoss SEAM which both provide extended Groovysupport, or generics to help JPA or Hibernate properly handle typed collections.

In this release, new meta-programming capabilities have been contributed thanks to the work of the Grails project developers, pursueing our symbiotic relationship. A few syntax enhancements have also found their way into it to help ease the development of Domain-Specific Languages. Groovy's Swing builder support, to help you build Swing UIs, has almost completely been rewritten and spiced up with several useful additions. For more details on this, Danno Ferrin listed what has changed in SwingBuilder.. A great attention to performance improvements made this new version much snappier than before, as witnessed by a reports we had by teams working on mission-critical applications using Groovy as a business language.

Since Groovy 1.0, the team also worked on improving the tool chain by creating a joint Java / Groovy compiler to let you mix and match Groovy and Java classes in the same compilation step. A GroovyDoc equivalent to JavaDoc lets you document your Groovy classes. The rewritten interactive shell is now really interactive and provides useful command completions for making you more productive, and the Groovy Swing console has also been improved thanks to our talented Swing team and the help of Swing expert Romain Guy.

Initially, the Groovy team expected to call the release 1.1, as shown by the various betas and release candidates for 1.1, but considering the breadth of improvements and new features, the team decided to rebrand it to 1.5, which corresponds more to the level of maturity and quality of the language, following the path of other projects such as Spring jumping from 2.1 to 2.5 right before the release.

Apart from improvements or the creation of these new tools, you should have a look at JetBrains' JetGroovy, a fantastic Groovy and Grails plugin which provides advanced coding capabilities to IntelliJ IDEA:

You can also listen to the interview of Groovy Project Manager and G2One VP Technology Guillaume Laforge that was recorded at QCon 2007, in March, in London, or read G2One's team interview at JavaLobby.

I would like to thank everybody who was involved in this release in a way or another: the Groovy developers for their hard work, patch and documentation contributors, users reporting bugs or requesting new features or improvements, book authors.

Several well-known companies have put great efforts in helping us making Groovy what it is today:

IBM: Eclipse plugin improvements and upgrade to support this latest version of the language,

Oracle: JMX support improvements to call remote beans as if they were local,